I was to shut Lorac down and put it all back in the transit cases. Asking what to do with the custom made rack that came with it (a Lorac rack?) I was told to dispose of it. Dutifully, I packed up the equipment and threw the rack over the side.
Michelson returned to port in Florida. The Lorac tech rep left for Oklahoma. After a couple of days we were told that contrary to what we had been told, sea trials would resume and we needed the Lorac for navigational information! A different Lorac rep arrived. With its mounting rack deep sixed, I got some line and lashed the Lorac stuff down to the big chart table in the Survey Control Center. Once again we were off to the Bahamas.
The newly installed electronics still was not working as intended and not necessarily working together. While the new inertial system (SINS) had already been deployed elsewhere, the SASS (array sonar) had never before been installed on a survey ship. This was supposed to furnish a plot of the ocean bottom contours across a wide swath rather than the bottom profile we got from the narrow beam stabilized sonar. SASS continued to need work, given the limits of computer power and data storage (magnetic tape) at that time.
There is much to read on the internet about the history of array sonar. Michelson was the test bed for this new technology, grandfather to all side scan sonars and fish finders since then. In the summer of '64 it was unproven.
We also had an early version of the navy's Transit satellite navigator. At that time there were few satellites available, so position fixes could be obtained infrequently, but often enough to reset SINS, then the world's most expensive dead reckoning navigator. SINS, of course, was another technical grand daddy, to all naval and aeronautical inertial systems.
One of the new things that had been installed in Brooklyn was a large meter by the helm in the pilot house. SINS was supposed to feed it steering direction, left (port), center (on course) and right (starboard). The object was to keep the meter centered. All of this was supposed to help the duty oceanographer and the AB at the helm maintain a steady course over a desired survey track, but I never saw it work. We had a lot of stuff that didn't work. That was the reason for the four months of sea trials.
During the whole time, May through August, Michelson never called at any Bahamas port, instead operating out of Port Canaveral, the Port of Palm Beach and Port Everglades in Florida. Meanwhile, nearly every radio aboard ship was tuned to the Nassau radio station ZNS, pronounced "Zed-N-S", playing the the pop music of summer 1964.
